With the current version of C4C - released May 2014 - we have included support for some of our utility specific objects. The focus is for us to be able to support the
Business to Business (B2B) sales process with integration to the SAP CRM for Utilities solution.
This is great news for us who want to further support the Utilities Key Account Managers (KAM) with the effective handling of the sales process delivered by standard C4C functionality and now extending this with specific attributes relevant for their industry.
The B2B Sales Process
From talking to our customers we know that a portion of the support needed from IT tools are not industryspecific. We have therefore adopted C4C’s standard support for things like Workflow, Email Integration. From a process perspective we are also using the standard C4C sales process, but with the addition of utility attributes like Premises, Meter Points (POD’s) and the Business Agreement.
With this we are now able to perform the sales process and capturing the relevant information for the SAP CRM system to perform the Quote calculation with the utility specific data needed in CRM for Utilities.
Here you see a sample of the screens form the C4C solution.
The above screen is an example of the Business Agreement and also shows how the UI looks in the C4C solution.
The Data Model
For the more technical interested, I have included a view of the data model and how it aligns to the backend system. I have drawn red boxes around the objects we have added as part of utility functionality. The dashed line around Quotation is to indicate that Quotation already existed in C4C but we added utility attributes to the solution.
Do I still need SAP CRM for Utilities?
Yes – we still need SAP CRM for the process to work because:
- We collect the information needed to create a quote in C4C, but the actual quote
calculation is performed in the CRM backend and then handed back to C4C as a
PDF document.
- The integration to the utility technical objects and the Business Agreement is delivered as integration to SAP CRM
Moving forward
We are now working with customers to get feedback on what they see as the next set of functionality required. The intent is to keep working in a co-innovation mode with our customers.
Links to further material on Cloud for Customer
- SAP Cloud for Customer: http://help.sap.com/cloud4customer